SWARTHMORE

somewhat different mix of writers,analysis and writingof curricular change.T O N I M O R R I S O Nkind of inquiry shouldn’t be the only thing we do inEnglish literature,” she says. “We still need to study thebeautiful words. But knowledge has changed so muchover the last century that we need to have this kind ofconversation.”Although critics of curricular change contend thattoday’s scholars have no business imposing their concernson the great old literature, Weinstein and otherscontend that this approach has always been the practiceand, in truth, is the only possible way to read literature.“There’s nothing else we can do,” Weinstein says.“We can’t take off our year-2000 glasses. They’re notexchangeable. What you can do is be aware that you’rewearing those lenses and seek to accent them as much aspossible with what you can learn about the lenses of a differenttime. But you can never put yourself back in time insome naive way and see Hamlet as a man or woman in the1600s would.”Speaking of Hamlet, Beowulf, and the like, have they reallygone the way of the literary buffalo? Contrary to the claimsof the conservative critics, James notes that Shakespeareand other members of the pantheon still have a strong presenceon Swarthmore syllabi. Fourteen of the 18 introductoryEnglish courses offered in the 1999–2000 course cataloginclude works by the Bard. By comparison, Toni Morrison,the Nobel Prize–winning author whose inclusion in theEnglish curriculum is decried by the NAS, is taught in just 2of the 18 and Zora Neale Hurston in 1. It is true, as the NAScharges, that studying Shakespeare is not required of Englishmajors, but as Williamson notes, nearly all majors do so atsome point in their Swarthmore career. Further deepeningthe department’s roots, Williamson’s survey course,“Beowulf to Milton,” covers the literature of Anglo-Saxon,Middle English, Renaissance, and 17th-century periods.Like other elite liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore hasn’tcrowded out the canonical authors. Rather, the College hassimply expanded the universe to accommodate newer writerswithout displacing the old. Excluding theater courses,the department offered just 24 courses in 1964; by this year,the number had grown to more than 100.The worthiness of newcomers like Morrison for a place inthat wider universe is another question, one that Williamson,the medievalist, answers passionately. The NAS andother conservative critics, he believes, “want to teach TheNorton Anthology from 30 years ago.” That many of the new-Please turn to page 69John Milton Anchee Min N. Scott Momaday Cherrie Moraga Sir Thomas More William Morris Toni Morrison Paul Muldoon Bharati MukherjeeFriedrich Nietzsche Flora Nwapa Flannery O’Connor Sharon Olds Eugene O'Neill Sembene Ousmane Sara Paretsky Marge Piercy Harold PinterLuigi Pirandello Alexander Pope Katherine Anne Porter Marcel Proust Thomas Pynchon Ann Radcliffe Ishmael Reed Adrienne RichSamuel Richardson Rainer Maria Rilke Tomas Rivera Mary Robinson Richard Rodriguez Salman Rushdie Joanna Russ Edward W. Said SapphireFerdinand de Saussure Olive Schreiner William Shakespeare Ntokaze Shange Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley Julie ShikeguniSir Philip Sidney Leslie Silko Georg Simmel Susan Sontag Gary Soto Stephen Spender Edmund Spenser Olaf Stapledon Gertrude SteinWallace Stevens Sara Suleri Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Jonathan Swift Torquato Tasso Drew Hayden Taylor Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ngugi Wa Thiong'oDylan Thomas Henry David Thoreau James Tiptree Jr. Leo Tolstoy John Kennedy Toole Jean Toomer Amos Tutuola Mark Twain Jules Verne VirgilGerald Vizenor Alice Walker Ian Watt Max Weber John Webster Rebecca Wells Nathanael West Edith Wharton Walt Whitman Oscar WildeRaymond Williams Terry Tempest Williams William Carlos Williams Barbara Wilson Jeanette Winterson Virginia Woolf Dorothy WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth Richard Wright Mary Wroth Sir Thomas Wyatt Wakako Yamauchi William Butler Yeats Ray A. Young BearS E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 015